Amodei: Cantor loss won’t stop immigration reform

WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei said the shocking defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary race this week has not altered his support for immigration reform.

Cantor, R-Va., lost Tuesday’s primary race to GOP challenger Dave Brat, a tea party-style candidate who attacked Cantor for supporting efforts to grant legal status to young immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Amodei, R-Carson City., said he still believes that the House should take up reform that includes a way for many undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship by learning English and American civics, paying back taxes and fines and waiting more than a decade.

“I don’t believe the majority leader lost his race because he supported a bill to help immigrants who came here as children,” Amodei said. “I think that when you look at the race that there was a feeling in the district that he spent a lot of time being a very good majority leader and team member on the national level but folks in (Virginia’s 7th District) felt like they were being taken for granted.”

“I don’t think the Eric Cantor race, despite all the national media editorializing for the last 24 hours, was a referendum on immigration reform,” Amodei said. “Now, having said that, I can tell you that there are probably plenty of my colleagues who had to have their hand held so they didn’t wet the bed last night after the election results came in.”

The recent influx of children from Central America crossing the border into Texas underscores the continuing need for reform, Amodei said.

“We need to do something instead of everybody running for the hills,” the congressman said.

But political analysts said most Republican House members won’t react like Amodei.

“Most House Republicans will be very skittish to take on immigration reform,” said Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California. “Their attitude will be: why risk it? Look what happened to Cantor.”

Eric Herzik, chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Reno, said “immigration reform is dead.”

“No one in the House is going to touch it,” he said. “They’re shocked and they’re thinking, ‘This could happen to me.’ “

Prospects for immigration reform were already bleak in the House even before Cantor’s defeat, Pitney said.

“They’re even bleaker now,” he said.

The House has not voted on any major immigration reform legislation in the year since the Senate passed its comprehensive bill to beef-up border security, overhaul the visa system, and give undocumented immigrants a chance to earn legal status and citizenship.

Cantor and other GOP House leaders rejected the huge Senate bill from the beginning. But they had planned to take up a series of separate bills addressing major immigration issues — a plan that has failed to materialize because many rank-and-file Republicans balked at voting on the thorny matter in an election year.

Immigrant rights’ activists said it’s ironic to them that the immigration reform issue is being blamed for Cantor’s defeat when they saw Cantor as a major obstacle to getting anything done in the House.

Cantor’s real problem was that he tried to have it both ways on immigration reform, said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice immigrant rights’ group.

“Eric Cantor spoke out of both sides of his mouth,” Sharry said. “He told his constituents in his campaign mailers that he was single-handedly blocking reform. He told people in Washington he wanted something to pass. People aren’t stupid. They got fed up.”

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes granting legal status to most undocumented immigrants, agreed that Cantor lost credibility on the issue.

“Cantor wanted to have it both ways,” Krikorian said. “He wanted to satisfy the corporate donors who demand cheap (immigrant) labor and at the same time he wanted to respond to public concerns about the lack of security in our immigration system. He lost touch with ordinary folks.”

In contrast, Sharry said, Graham won his GOP primary easily Tuesday night despite being attacked by challengers for championing the Senate immigration reform bill that passed in June 2013. Graham was a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that crafted the Senate bill.

“Lindsey Graham showed leadership,” Sharry said. “He stood up for immigration reform, he defended it and he explained it. And he won.”

But that won’t stop the shock of Cantor’s defeat from shaking up House members, Pitney said.

“There is a tendency in each chamber to focus on the politics of that chamber and discount what happens in the other,” he said. “What Republican House members are going to take away from Cantor’s defeat is that immigration reform is dangerous.”

The death knell of immigration reform that comes with Cantor’s defeat puts more pressure on President Barack Obama to reduce deportations of undocumented immigrants whose only crime is being in the United States illegally, said Louis DeSipio, professor of political science and Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine.

The Obama administration had been waiting to see if the House would act on immigration reform.

“The ball is in the administration’s court to use the powers that they have,” DeSipio said. “Nobody is counting on Congress anymore.”